PT Blog

With Republic Machine’s “Split-A-Part” design, the entire power frame assembly of the industrial shredder splits horizontally apart from the feed assembly frame.

Sooner or later a shredder is going to need maintenance, and it may more frequently require cleanout, particularly if you need to separate different scrap materials from one another. With a conventional machine design, that literally means climbing into the feed hopper to accomplish these tasks, which is time consuming and potentially dangerous.

With Republic Machine’s “Split-A-Part” design, however, the entire power frame assembly splits apart horizontally from the feed assembly frame. This gives the operator or maintenance personnel unencumbered access to the rotor as well as other internal machine components.

In one of my previous lives at The Dow Chemical Company, I ran an optical microscopy lab in the Dow Pack Studios facility in Freeport, Texas. One of our tasks was to analyze different inclusions to determine the type and source. This analysis would include making a slide and placing the sample on a hot stage where it would be heated under a controlled manner to melt the polymer away from the inclusion and see how the inclusion responds to heat. The hot stage would be placed under an optical microscope usually at 50× magnification.

I use the term inclusion rather than gel because there seems to be some debate as to what the definition of a gel is. Some say, “It’s not a gel, it’s an un-melt”, or “It’s not a gel, it’s a contaminant”. A quick Google search for the definition of a polymer gel will get you the definitions: gelatin, jelly, bath gels, and others.

In making ‘single-use’ its Word of the Year, Collins Dictionary acknowledged how wide spread the concept of one-and-done plastics has become, with that common usage almost entirely in a negative connotation.

Single-use plastics continue to find themselves in the spotlight—in both positive and negative ways. As a result, Collins Dictionary selected ‘single-use’ as its Word of the Year. The group says that its records show a four-fold increase in usage of this word since 2013, with news stories and the likes of the BBC’s Blue Planet II raising public awareness of this environmental issue.

Lauren Good, vice president of finance (and founder Chip Gear’s daughter), and Greg Cebular, vice president of sales and management, stand in front of one of the Carbon M2 Digital Light Synthesis (DLS) 3D printers at The Technology House. The company has been using stereolithography for prototyping for more than two decades, but only recently began 3D printing production parts, thanks to this equipment.

The Technology House is currently equipped with three Carbon M1 printers and two M2 printers, as well as a Smart Part Washer (visible in the lower left corner of this photo). This equipment is provided by Carbon through a subscription model.

Speed, surface finish and durable materials are just a few of the advantages TTH has found with its Carbon 3D printers. End-use parts such as these nozzles for cleaning out Vitamix blenders can be quickly produced in high quantities. TTH is delivering the full production run of the optimized version of this part (left) solely through 3D printing.

The Technology House (TTH) is a company that knows 3D printing. The Streetsboro, Ohio, business has been 3D printing with stereolithography since its launch more than 20 years ago as a product development firm. Over the years founder Chip Gear and his team have leveraged SLA to quickly and flexibly produce prototypes, master molds for urethane casting, tooling and more.

But until recently, TTH never saw 3D printing as a viable option for manufacturing end-use production parts. Its SLA printers produced parts with fine detail and good surface finish, but brittle material properties. The slow speed and limited materials available for SLA kept 3D printing firmly in the early stages of the product lifecycle at TTH, even as it added machining and injection molding capability to pursue production work. But with the addition of Digital Light Synthesis (DLS) printers and auxiliary equipment fromCarbon, 3D printing of parts at production scales has become a full reality for the Ohio business.

Eastman Chemical’s proprietary amorphous copolyester Tritan and new Treva engineering bioplastic, which falls into the family of cellulosics knows as cellulose acetate propionate (CAP), both scored highly in an audio application dominated by PC.

Working with recognized acoustics product development firm DW Designs, Port Hueneme, California, Eastman Chemical molded and tested beryllium models in-ear monitor housings using a variety of materials. The findings were presented at the annual Rocky Mountain International Audio Fest (CanJam), held in Denver Oct. 5-7, by DW Designs’ principal Dan Wiggins and Eastman senior application development engineer John Quigley.